"I'm worried, Zelgadis-san."
"I know Amelia. Is your head all right?"
"Yes. But.. but.. why....?" And she began to quietly cry. Gourry heard this, identified it as Amelia, and he felt nothing. It was a tiny princess in misery, and he felt nothing. His heart had burned out in bloody purple. He felt nothing. He said nothing. He was nothing.
Amelia glanced over to see Gourry's eyes opened and had to look away. There was something so wrong in them now.. like looking to the sky and seeing frozen seas over your head instead. Lina was gone.. And now so was Gourry-san, really.. hands clenched around that fragment that had survived, and an unseen anchor suddenly left them to become a breathing ghost.
"Anything?" His voice was better but still brittle and reedy. Amelia's head had healed slowly; she was the master of full recovery, and as of yet still unable to cast it on herself. So small healing spells were administered until she was back on her feet; the dizzy confused light leaving her sad blue eyes. It was so odd to sleep in a room alone.
"A bit, Gourry. A possible lead." The tall man climbed shakily to his feet, eyes huge and blank in his thinning face, the smudges under his eyes whispering falsely of sleepless nights. Sleeping was all Gourry really did anymore. A week since Lina's murder. A week since his life had ended but he had foolishly not followed her.
Just as well.
Business.
Affairs to tie up.
Revenge.
"Good. Tell me." The carefree tone had shriveled and died in his broken voice, becoming crisp and cold where even Zelgadis had failed.
"Two days to the south a robed man was seen in the company of wolves. Purple fire clung to him, I was told." Gourry kicked out the remains of the night's fire and slung his sword over his shoulder, tightening the knot at his waist.
Zelgadis gave an unseen wince; the wrap at Gourry's waist an eternal reminder of having to return to the inn and collect Lina's meager possessions from her and Amelia's room. Gourry had found a second cloak, this one older and more worn, and had not been with out it since, wrapping it about his waist and knotting it, sleeping with it pulled taught across his broad shoulders. An old cloak and a bit of scorched fabric. Save for that, you'd really have never known that Lina Inverse had been there, and saved the world three times over. It just wasn't fair, dammit. And now another of his friends was.. gone inside..
Watching Gourry empty himself inside was a hurtful experience. Lina was the one who kept Gourry from these things; Lina had taken it with her. Zel.. didn't know how to feel about this. So he chose not to feel at all, trying to lock Lina away inside the way he had with Rezo, and chose instead to focus on his friends. Lina was.. dead. It was hard to say, but avoiding that would not make her just come back to life. He had shed his tears for his friend, and was afraid far away in his soul that he was soon going to have to shed tears again for another fallen comrade.
That night was bad. A bad night always followed and then preceded a bad day of late. Gourry lay in bed, curled impossibly small and in on himself, the cape and the smell of a now dead lover his only minute comforts. Inside his eyelids he saw her, sitting, in the wind and away. He wanted to catch her but did not; her seated stance was unmoving, only her hair active in the non-stop wind, seeming to dance and cackle. Gourry did not mind the wind. The wind blew and blew and screamed and tugged, but.. she never left. And right now, that was more than he had. She was there.
He could feel her stare upon him, and could not look away. One of her enormous eyes had been fractured and filled with blood, but her gaze was clear and steady; intense and that was a calming effect on this dreary plain where everything was higgledy-piggledy and the colors bled wrongly into each other. Every night he got a little closer to her. A swordsman had patience for the important things. Only focus on the moment. He could wait.
"And what the dead had no speech for,
when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the
communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond
the language of the living."
-- T.S Eliot: Four Quarters, Little Gidding